The Silicon Graybeard posts good news about the current solar cycle:
Back on my Wandering Around Monday, I noted that solar cycle 25 had just posted the highest sunspot number since cycle 23 back in 2002; the highest sunspot number in 21 years.So why is this good news? Because we've known for centuries that the price of grain is inversely correlated with the number of sunspots:
And so to sun spots and climate. We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D. We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further - pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!). The reason is that bread is the staff of life - no bread, and people starved.
In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers. Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings. This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the "Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia" theory.
First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years. William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800. When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low - harvests are good. When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.
Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years. You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.
So yay for sun spots. To celebrate, here is some music from back when Disney made good films (the music here was the soundtrack to the 1959 Academy Award winning Disney short Grand Canyon.
6 comments:
Strange, it is almost like BOB (Big ole Ball) in the sky has more to do with climate changes or cycles on this planet than anything else..
Do you envision the war between Ukes vs Russkis not to have a big impact, with less whest being grown, and/or harvests abandoned in some areas?
JohnD, I don't know. But we can expect wheat grown everywhere to be more abundant (and therefore lower price) which is good news for the world's poor.
- Borepatch
One can hope Borepatch. Most Modern famines don't come from lack of food but mismanagement of the world supply of food.
Transportation, politics and so on.
And there is that little thing about a severe lack of fertilizer this last spring due to shutting down major fertilizer factories in America (Via EPA) and Germany due to lack of cheap Russian natural gas, a Prime ingredient and power source for the fertilizer factories.
All I know is reading Walmart's dry beans and white rice bag codes last year we were just getting into the last years stock. Now we are in our last harvest stock. Normally Walmart has two year old stock on the shelves.
At Hannaford the store brand chicken noodle soup (excellent stuff relabeled chunky soup I bet) was a $1.25 in January, YESTERDAY it was 2.19 for the same 15.5 ounce can.
The 4 Horsemen *might* be warming up friend. I suggest to all those I care about that a deep larder is a far better investment than digital "money" in the bank. Worse care situation if I'm off base is you get to EAT it.
Beautiful music on another rainy (very rainy) day in NH.
I have long suspected and argued to (the few) friend who believe in climate change that the climate runs in cycles. That while we seem to be in a warmer cycle now in most of the country (and maybe the world); we have had cycles of colder weather before and will again. I was born in the 1950s, and the 1960s and 70s had much colder (I think) weather than we do today. I can remember Time magazine running an article on the coming cold weather apocalypse.
This would seem to add some credence to that theory.
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